The dieroller is a direct port of the one from OpenRPG. One of our forum members has actually looked at the source code for that because he wrote his own extensions for the program back in the days when it was one of the predominant options for chat-based D&D. Random number generators are a sufficiently difficult field of computer science for him to have used his work to get his first permanent programming job.

Anyway, he's assured me that OpenRPG's methods produce results that are indeed random, with outputs better than most well-made physical dice. The mathematics involved quickly went far beyond my grasp. But I trust his word for it, and my selection of the module that provides our diceroller functionality was because I used it for years with good results.

You're at 4 successes, two failures. One more failure ends the skill challenge; one more success wins it.

At this point, you have a lot of kindling, dead brush, and similar plant matter heaped just inside the cave, ready to be set alight. Fanax is some distance away by now, having gone looking around to see whether he can find any sign of a secondary point of egress.

Roll for initiative, please. I'll be using the outcome to decide who gets to act next.

I'll go ahead and roll my skill check while we're at it, in case no one beats me in initiative and fails the challenge before I get to act. Oni will use Listen to try and make sure this invisible, undetectable monstrosity doesn't sneak up on us while we're trying to rub two sticks together.

There is no limit with regard to how many times the PCs can check on a given skill, and the list I offered at the start of the skill challenge was exemplary rather than restrictive. If you come up with a plausible application of the Perform skill, you can attempt it.

Well, there is definitely a fire burning in the cavern's entry. It's big enough to cover three squares, and there probably isn't any way to get in or out of the cavern without walking through it (unless there's another exit somewhere).

It's a little early yet for your characters to be able to tell whether enough smoke is being trapped inside for it to be effective. You've chosen to proceed in a fashion that may be effective, but telling whether it is working is not an instantaneous thing—it's a pretty big cave.

On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be an angry dragon attacking you right now. So it's also not immediately obvious that your effort has failed, either. It seems likely that the dragon either doesn't know what you've done, or has escaped and has not (yet) mounted some kind of counterattack. Presumably Vumrot would have confronted you before you had a fire lit in front of the front door, if you'd failed to be stealthy enough.

I suppose that Gorx could order his fire elementals to go and seek out Vumrot in order to fight him, but the big V has already killed several of Gorx's spirit allies too quickly for Gorx to know what was happening until it was already over. So he might be throwing their lives away. Spirits that die in his service STAY dead (shamans do not summon their allies; they call them), so that's . . . problematic from several different directions at once.

So I'm basically not going to tell you whether it failed. You will have to send in scouts, or else wait and give your stratagem time to work.

The elementals have a valid point, though, in asserting that you'll need to keep feeding this fire. Even if you dismiss them, it's only going to burn for so long on what's piled up in the cavern entry. After a half-hour or so at the most, it'll burn down to embers unless you replenish it with substantial fuel. Logs would be good.

I feel like it would be kind of hard to do if a goblin helped Oni. Don't want to keep volunteering Yonah for stuff but we don't have to do a lot of sneaking around right now, so maybe we should be doing manual labor.

So is Gorx keeping the elementals here, or what? It's becoming obvious that they're not really going to be a lot of help, unless you have some kind of pressing need to talk to beings that are geniuses about fire and otherwise barely sentient.

He is quite capable of keeping them around for another six hours or so, but the fire is started. If you don't think the dragon is fireproof and you believe that your upcoming stratagem with Zathrus's tent is likely to flush it out of hiding, then having them stick around isn't bad from a tactical perspective, I guess.

My recollection is that those of you with ranks in Knowledge (arcana) didn't do very well on their checks, and neither did those of the Great Horde's leadership who had ranks. So you know that the dragon is white (because you had witness accounts to draw from), but your characters don't really appear to have made any conclusion that the dragon's color might be significant.

At least a couple of you seem to have been acting from the assumption that dragons breathe fire.

On the other hand, those of Gorx's air elementals that survived first contact with the dragon were gabbling about icy wind and frost. And before that, Fanax discovered a cache of animal carcasses that looked like they had been frozen.

It is totally reasonable to say that it doesn't help, but I don't think the question is overly far-fetched. By way of example, the region where Philadelphia is today is Coaquannock, which means Grove of Tall Pines. That tells you a little bit about the area, esp. in comparison to Pittsburgh's Allegheny - a direct reference to the rivers in the region. I'll accept that Draconic doesn't make meaningful differences between Frost Dragons and Fire Dragons and those ridiculous gem dragons.

Gorx will keep the fire elementals around for now and dismiss them later if they're ineffectual.